


thinking you could live without me

by lazyfish



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-14 18:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18953230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/lazyfish
Summary: Jemma learns who she can't live without.





	thinking you could live without me

She kisses a boy who tastes like beer and summer, ozone crackling around them as the first real thunderstorm of the year begins to brew.

She kisses the boy because he knows what it’s like to love somebody too close. She kisses him because he knows what it’s like to feel the other half of her heart beating out of time, what it’s like to know that love will never be enough on its own. She kisses him because she can and she wants to and he wants to and his lips don’t reek of sea salt and regret.

She kisses that boy until she’s sure the weight in her chest means something more than she’s willing to admit and she knows she cannot - will not - live without him and his whiskey gold eyes.

\---

She kisses a girl with eyes that are miles of sky, a horizon of a place she wants desperately to visit. Summer’s gone now but she still kisses her summer boy, still wakes up with her head on his chest. 

He knows.

Sometimes kissing someone is coming home and sometimes it is an adventure, but with her it’s both at once - the shadowy corners of a hometown that are both foreign and familiar, known and unknown. It’s intoxicating and oh-so-different and when she’s kissing this girl it doesn’t matter what the hell is happening anywhere else.

So what if there are now two too many people she can’t live without? (She never thought she’d be the sort of person who thought they could live life on her own, but well -

There’s a lot of things she never thought she’d be.)

\---

Collision course. It’s a collision course and now she’s kissing her first love and it’s so different and so the same; there are only so many ways lips can meet lips but damn it, there’s an infinity of ways hearts can meet hearts.

She has so many people to thank for this moment happening at all, but mostly she has two people who made this possible; mostly she has two people who taught her how to love someone without loving them too close.

She wants him, she wants this extraordinary boy, but she doesn’t want him if she can’t have it all. She doesn’t know how to say that so she just kisses him harder and trusts the world would not have put her on this collision course if it wasn’t prepared for all the damage she could do if she collided wrong.

\---

There are three people now, three little hash marks on her heart that won’t go away, even if she scrubs and scrubs and scrubs. Most of the time she doesn’t try too hard to wash them away but there are mornings she wakes up alone and she’s crushed by questions like  _ what the hell happens if all three of them walk away? _

It’s an ugly question. They’re all ugly questions and even uglier answers.

With the three tick marks come three pairs of hands, three stubborn heads and three voices to remind her like hell they’re leaving. 

It’s not the same, maybe it’s not even enough, but she stays.

\---

She kisses the boy, and the girl, and the boy. She keeps kissing them until one day she realizes five years have flown by like the birds now flying south for the winter. 

Five years of summer lips and skyline eyes and ocean kisses that don’t taste like regret anymore. Five years of callused hands and hummed lullabies and laughter lines. Five years of happiness, five years of sorrow, five years of a lot of emotions in between.

Five years of the people she can’t live without.


End file.
